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Twitter to get Location Sharing Feature
Techtree News Staff, Aug 21, 2009 1800 hrs ISTLet people know where you are while you Tweet
Twitter, a popular micro-blogging website, will now offer an optional broadcasting feature to it registered users. Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, stated in a blog post on the official Twitter blog that a new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. This means Twitter will add locations to the updates sent by the registered users. A number of apps using the location feature on mobile platform exists, however, their effectiveness is limited and dependent on other services.
Recently, Twitter announced its Project Retweet in its API changing information and now, the API will bring yet another feature - Geo-location. This new Geolocation API integration will add geographic metadata along with the user's twitter update for adding contextual substance to it.
First premise is that users will have to activate it by choice since it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be shared for longer period of time. Hence, the security concerns of location broadcasting remains in the hands of users. Stone, in the blog post, stated, "For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city-whether you follow them or not".
Twitter will release Geolocation feature for its platform developers before the feature is added to Twitter website. It's likely that Geolocation support will come to Twitter applications first before it appears on Twitter website and mobile web site for all.
In future, if Google Latitude integrates Twitter support than it would be great to find out the users near the same location and of course, new Twitter users as well. Just a wild thought.
Recently, Twitter announced its Project Retweet in its API changing information and now, the API will bring yet another feature - Geo-location. This new Geolocation API integration will add geographic metadata along with the user's twitter update for adding contextual substance to it.
First premise is that users will have to activate it by choice since it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be shared for longer period of time. Hence, the security concerns of location broadcasting remains in the hands of users. Stone, in the blog post, stated, "For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city-whether you follow them or not".
Twitter will release Geolocation feature for its platform developers before the feature is added to Twitter website. It's likely that Geolocation support will come to Twitter applications first before it appears on Twitter website and mobile web site for all.
In future, if Google Latitude integrates Twitter support than it would be great to find out the users near the same location and of course, new Twitter users as well. Just a wild thought.
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